I have some questions about RFC-MNEM and concerns about the wording in
RFC-MNEM relating to compatibility/agreement with the contents of
RFC-XXXX.
1) RFC-MNEM should be revised to explicitly state that mail messages
using RFC-MNEM must also be fully compliant with RFC-XXXX. To do
otherwise might cause RFC-MNEM messages to be sent that are not
RFC-XXXX compliant and that could cause interoperability requirements.
2) I'd really like to see RFC-CHAR to review it for other interoperability
issues. It is an essential part of the RFC-MNEM procedure since
it details the encoding.
If Keld doesn't feel it is worth mailing, maybe it could be made
available for anonymous ftp with the file name and host published
on a note to the ietf-822 list.
3) I'm concerned about the "charset" item on page 3 of the RFC-MNEM draft,
it isn't clear but it might be read as encouraging the use of character
set encodings that aren't part of RFC-XXXX in some cases. I hope that
this isn't the intention and it is just a wording problem.
4) I would also like to see the text reference to "ASCII" changed to
"US ASCII" with a reference to RFC-XXXX added and a reference to
ANSI X3.64 added. Someplaces people use "ASCII" when they really
mean ISO 646 or a ISO 646 variant and it is important for the RFC
to be unambiguous.
5) How should the Content-Type: header be changed when transformation
occurs ? This isn't clear to me. A detailed example of before and
after transformation would help me.
6) Is "communication character set" the character set used during
transport using SMTP or is it the sender's character set encoding
or the receiver's character set encoding ?
7) The example header refers to "ISO_8859-1" while RFC-XXXX uses
"ISO-8859-1".
Ran
randall(_at_)Virginia(_dot_)EDU